Demetrius César Andrade vs. Liam Williams

Saturday at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, FL. WBO middleweight title at stake, 4th defense of Andrade. Williams is the number two ranked contender, after Jaime Munguía.

Bet you all didn't realize BooBoo even had a middle name, let alone with a diacritic. Well, turns out his surname doesn't signify that he's your typical high-yellow light-skinned black guy with some vague Latino descent somewhere in his family tree but rather that he's Cape Verdean (which I should've guessed before now with his Rhode Island roots being a dead giveaway - that is basically the worldwide capital of the Cabo diaspora).

His challenger is, unambiguously, a Welshman, and quite a proud one at that. He's probably his country's hardest-hitting prizefighter since Maccarinelli, and its most popular since "The Pride of Wales himself, Joe Calzaghe (as neither Cleverly nor Selby ever quite won over hearts & minds with the same acclamation). He looks to join their ranks holding a world championship in, technically, his first try for one (Smith I being for an interim belt).

 

He actually could be, if judging from just his skin tone; I know several full-blooded Verdean chicks at my job that are in fact even lighter than him. (remember, it was a Portuguese colony for a long ass time...like half a millennium, longer than most Caribbeans nations were - so they can run the gamut up and down the chromatic spectrum just the same as can any Hispanics from the West Indies...you can have Puerto Ricans, for instance, dark as undiluted coffee or snowy enough to be indistinguishable from their conquistador Spaniard forebears across the sea).

As it happens, my research bears out that you're correct - he's only half, via his full-blooded CV dad, Paul. His mom is Sharon Andrade, née Parker (so presumably some long-ago imported and melting-potted flavor of American)

 

Yeah, since then we have only hosted pro boxing events thrice in as many years:

1. A small hall show a month after what should've been Andrade vs. Saunders (with Kautondokwa subbing in, and me, having gotten tickets for the original event for my b-day, sitting ringside disappointedly cheering on the Namibian with decreasing enthusiasm with every passing round ) headline by Abraham Nova vs. Sulaiman Segawa
2. Even smaller card a few days later headlines by Chris Traietti defending his New England cruiserweight belt against 5-9 Nicholas Lavin ..in a rematch of their 2017 bout where Traietti captured the vacant title by near shutout
3. That double-header with Spike O'sullivan vs. Khiary Gray-Pitts and Mark DeLuca vs. Jimmy Williams that was streamed on the Dropkick Murphy's page on Facebook...poorly, with some feed dropouts at critical moments.

...and that's been it. This after we had some momentum going after DeGale vs. Dirrell being here drummed up/resuscitated some local interest in the sport.